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We speak to An Cliquet, a professor in the Department of European, Public and International Law at Ghent University, about working at the interface between conservation, biodiversity and law.
Similarities in planning, development and culture within urban areas may lead to the convergence of ecological processes on continental scales. Transdisciplinary, multi-scale research is now needed to understand and predict the impact of human-dominated landscapes on ecosystem structure and function.
In 2018 technologies on the International Space Station will provide ∼1 year of synchronous observations of ecosystem composition, structure and function. We discuss these instruments and how they can be used to constrain global models and improve our understanding of the current state of terrestrial ecosystems. Author Correction (05 September 2017)
Years before they conquered the Internet, cats colonized our sofas. But they haven’t spent the last ten thousand years just snoozing. A new study reveals that tamed cats swept through Eurasia and Africa carried by early farmers, ancient mariners and even Vikings. The researchers analysed DNA from over 200 cat remains and found that farmers in the Near East were probably the first people to successfully tame wild cats 9,000 years ago, before a second wave of cat domestication a few thousand years later in ancient Egypt.
The theme of UN World Wildlife Day 2017 was ‘Listen to the young voices’. We talk to Mya-Rose Craig (@BirdgirlUK), a young naturalist, environmentalist and writer, who was appointed European Green Capital Ambassador for her home town of Bristol, UK, in 2015.
Large-scale invasive species control initiatives are motivated by laudable desires for native species recovery and economic benefits, but they are not without risk. Management interventions and policies should include evidence-based risk–benefit assessment and mitigation planning.
The EvoKE project promotes formal discussion about the state of evolutionary education, outreach and policy in Europe. We talked to the organizing team (Xana Sá-Pinto, Héloïse Dufour, Inga Ubben, Tania Jenkins and Kristin Jenkins), about the first international EvoKE conference and future projects.
DNA sequencing is faster and cheaper than ever before but quantity does not necessarily mean quality. Towards a comprehensive understanding of the microbial biosphere, we need more reference genomes from single-celled eukaryotes (protists) across the full breadth of eukaryotic diversity.
